City of Tea Tree Gully empowers customers to self-service

City of Tea Tree Gully Council asked Seamless to build a scalable platform that would make all their services available online, from any device, 24 hours a day.

A focus on eServices

The City of Tea Tree Gully (CTTG) embarked on a mission to put the digital channel at the centre of its customer service offering, and leverage its website to transform how it delivers services to its customers. Together with Seamless, CTTG built an eServices portal that empowers residents to self-service, anytime day or night, from any modern device.

The eServices portal integrates a range of core internal CTTG business systems, including its document management system, resident addresses database, and customer request management system. However, residents aren’t exposed to any of these systems, and instead see a simple, single dashboard for the lodgement and tracking of all their requests.

By delivering a useful and usable online experience, CTTG can improve customer satisfaction and internal efficiency, while decreasing the cost of service for its customers and freeing up customer service staff to focus on more complex requests.

A smarter way to complete online requests

When customers are completing online forms a predictive auto-complete mechanism fills in the address by pulling property information from CTTG’s address register. This greatly increases the accuracy of the user’s submission and certainty that every request is attached to a valid address.

If a customer is completing a request from a mobile device, they can simply click the ‘Use My Location’ button and the portal will identify their current position, and automatically correlate the mobile GPS coordinates at time of request to the nearest property address from council’s properties database.

As council staff initiate, update or close customer requests, the eServices portal automatically send notifications to the customer, managing the entire communication loop from the raising of the request through to its close.

A simpler way to track council requests

Aside from email notifications, customers also have the option to create an online account so they can log in and track the progress of their requests themselves. Providing customers with live, 24/7 access to requests, greatly reduces the time spent by the customer service officers providing updates to customers.

To compliment the online status checking, residents can still use the customer reference number provided online for each request and contact customer service for updates. Even if a customer elects not to track their request online by creating a username and password, they can still elect to receive an email update when the request has been completed by providing their contact details when submitting the request.

A platform for growth

The SeamlessCMS and Authority CRM integration operates in both directions, allowing information submitted into request forms by residents to be captured into the CRM, and information stored in CRM to be pushed out into the portal, without any manual work or re-keying by customer service staff.

Beyond requests and reports, the eServices portal will be a critical business tool for CTTG that will extend to support a broad range of transactions and requests for everything from booking a library through to organising and holding a video-conferencing session with a town planner.